DEDICATED TO AN EXPANDED AWARENESS OF GOD’S “MYSTERY… WHICH IS CHRIST IN YOU”
I had entered in earlier years, by God’s grace, into a living experience of the Living God—Father, Son and Spirit. Through the Word made alive to me I recognized that not only had Christ died for my sins, but that He lived in me: But I still longed and searched for a completeness. I saw the answer to completeness in Paul’s constant use of the word “all” in his own experience—”all sufficiency in all things,” “I can do all things through Christ,” “strengthened with all might;” and in James’ “perfect faith” and “royal law of liberty”; and in Peter’s “after ye have suffered awhile, stablish, strengthen, settle you”: and in John’s “perfect love, for as He is so are we in this world.”
I also saw it as I read the lives, past and present, of those who had entered into the fullness of union with God. So I continued my search and pursuit until I could say with the Psalmist, “O God, my heart is fixed, my heart is fixed, I will sing and give praise.” Jesus said rightly, “Seek and ye shall find.” So I have found what is to me, by His grace, the Permanent Union, the Unchanging Presence, the Total Sufficiency, including the entire rationality of Revealed Truth.
Life is no longer a personal search and hunger, but involvement in another kind of hunger—for others—with its sufferings and glory (such as Paul the Intercessor reveals in his 2nd Corinthian letter of his outpoured life for others). I have found that there is the full equipment and authority for all of life, right in the midst of its storms and frustrations. The transition is from the daily dyings of the Lord Jesus, to His manifested life in our bodies; from the release from the two- power outlook of the Fall, to the one Power—God Only in all things.
Bill Volkman, with the help of others of us, has been moved by a strong conviction that we should share with others by this “Union Life” magazine what God has made so real and total to us. This is the first issue of a quarterly magazine which will link many who, having come some distance by grace (but not having yet attained), “press toward the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” May this be a portion of living bread to many.
Much love to each one,
Norman Grubb